Exo: A Novel (Jumper) (12 page)

That was 4.9 psi
gauge
, meaning it was 4.9 psi greater than our sea-level room pressure, or a total of 19.6 psi. Operating in a vacuum, it would be 4.9 psi absolute.

Once at this operating pressure, Cory had me hold my breath, since the air going in and out of my lungs changed the pressure readings. After thirty seconds of steady readings—no leaks—he let me breathe normally.

For the first time, it was effortless to breathe in the suit. The air pressure in my lungs counteracted the suit’s constriction of my chest. Initially there was a slight gag reflex, but that soon faded. We kept going for another five minutes and then stopped, as planned, because of CO
2
buildup.

“The seal looks good,” he said. “We’re obviously going to have to do something about the fogging.”

“You said it.” By the end of the five minutes I could barely see through the clear polycarbonate. “They pretreat with antifog solution in spacesuits, right?”

He nodded. “Yes, but they also pull excess moisture out of the mixture. If we’re going with a closed circuit rebreather, we’re going to have to deal with that.”

For the next test, we tucked a mesh bag of commercial diving-grade soda lime pellets in the back of the helmet to absorb CO
2
, and we extended the test to thirty minutes.

The neck seal performed well, but the interior of the helmet was coated with beads of water when we stopped.

“Right,” I said. “We have to deal with the moisture.”

*   *   *

The next day I shopped.

I’d already purchased oxygen tanks (Houston) and a forty-four-pound keg of commercial diving-grade soda lime pellets (Key West), as well as some very expensive laboratory-grade pressure valves (Seattle), but now I was after more fittings, armored hose, low-power computer cooling fans, activated charcoal, and a fifty-pound tub of silica gel desiccant.

While I acquired these, Cory spent his time in one of the engineering machine shops.

When we met back at his lab late in the afternoon, he suggested breaking for the day, but I could tell that he was as interested in proceeding as I was.

“Let’s push on.”

I’d splurged for the main tanks, choosing five composite M-15 medical tanks that held 425 liters of oxygen when fully charged to 3,000 psi. They were fifteen inches long and four inches in diameter.

Cory had insisted on a backup tank. “At least a half-hour’s worth.” I picked the smallest composite bottles I could find, five little one-hundred-seventy-liter tanks three and a half inches in diameter and less than ten inches long.

Cory made the rebreather chamber out of aluminum pipe, the same diameter and length as the main oxygen tank. One end was sealed with a welded plate and the other end was stoppered with a plug, with a double O-ring seal and exterior latch clamps. At both ends of the chamber, one-inch through ports connected to ninety-degree elbows.

By the time we quit, near midnight, both ends of the chamber interior had low-power computer fans mounted across the through ports with RadioShack three-AA cell battery mounts beside each of them. Three mesh cylinders, their outside diameters barely smaller than the inside of the pipe, filled the rest of the space. The first and longest mesh cylinder, taking up half the chamber’s length, was filled with soda lime pellets. The other two, using the rest of the interior space, held silica gel and activated charcoal.

“How do you turn on the fans?” I was tilting the cylinder back and forth, looking for a switch on the exterior.

“Inside,” Cory said. He lifted the lid off and pointed. The fan mounted on the lid had a tiny slide switch epoxied to the aluminum. He pointed at another switch glued to the side of the cylinder, just past the seal face. Tiny wires, also epoxied to the aluminum, ran down past the activated-charcoal carrier toward the other end.

“Why two, and why inside?”

“Redundancy. Either of them will give us enough air flow. Inside, because I didn’t want to run more holes.”

“Will the fans run long enough?”

“Yes. It’s all predicated on at least five hours of midlevel exertion. Two kilos of absorbent, four hundred twenty-five of O
2
, at least seven hours of battery for the fans. If you want to push it longer, we’ll need to add more double As, and you’ll probably need to wear a diaper.”

I knew the astronauts did when on their extended EVAs, but I didn’t find the notion particularly attractive.

“Five hours sounds like plenty. I can always take bathroom breaks.”

We broke for the night then, but we were both back early the next day.

We mounted the chamber on a commercial diving harness that I’d found when shopping for the CO
2
absorbent. It had a stainless steel back plate over form-fitting back padding, and fully adjustable shoulder, belt, and crotch straps that I could snug up directly over the MCP suit or over any number of extra protective layers. It also had several large stainless steel D-rings on the shoulder straps and belt for attaching additional equipment.

We clamped the main tank and the rebreathing chamber horizontally across the back plate. One-inch ID armored hoses ran from the elbows on the rebreather chamber to through ports on the base of the helmet at the rear, right: incoming, left: return. The incoming air was diverted up, toward the top of the helmet, before coming down to nose and mouth, and hopefully, keeping the face port fog free. The exhaled air was sucked back into the rebreather chamber from the return port, dragged through the soda lime to trap the CO
2
, through the silica gel to trap moisture, and through the activated charcoal, to absorb bad breath, I guess, before returning.

A short quarter-inch armored hose ran from the main O
2
tank to the feed valve on the sealed end of the rebreather chamber. The feed valve released oxygen into the chamber (and therefore the suit) when the helmet pressure dropped below 4.85 psi. An overpressure valve mounted in the helmet released air to the exterior, if the relative helmet pressure exceeded 5 psi, but this was only expected to happen when I transitioned from the earth’s surface to the upper atmosphere.

“Or if you have a catastrophic failure of the feed valves and it pumps O
2
in without stopping,” said Cory.

The backup oxygen we mounted in front, on the side of the belt, running a quarter-inch armored hose up the shoulder strap to another underpressure valve mounted to the helmet’s base. This underpressure valve would keep the helmet pressurized to 4.85 psi. If the rebreather failed, I could push a button on the overpressure purge and manually vent air from the helmet, also venting CO
2
. Either of the feed valves, sensing the pressure drop, would add fresh oxygen into the system.

“At least that’s the theory,” said Cory. “We have to test it, but I skipped breakfast. You want to go get us some lunch? You know,
your
way?”

He meant jumping. He’d gotten used to being able to send me on errands, no matter how far.

“Okay. Stand up.”

He did, asking, “Why?”

I did one of Dad’s patented jump-grab-jump moves and Cory was staggering away from me in an alcove at Shinjuku Station. Though it had been early afternoon at Stanford, it was predawn here. Still, it was one of the busiest stations in the world and when I stepped around the corner, hundreds of people were walking toward this platform or that.

Cory recovered enough to step out beside me, his eyes wide. “Where are we?”

“Tokyo. Shinjuku Station.”

“Why are we here?”

I raised my eyebrows. “Lunch!” I led him around the corner to a takeaway bento box vendor. They were always open, which is why I came here a lot. A clerk was putting out the boxes for morning rush hour, some breakfast boxes, but mostly lunches for passengers to carry away with them for later in the day.

The middle-aged woman clerk-in-charge recognized me and bowed.

Dad would call that bad security but I liked knowing people. I liked people knowing
me
. I smiled and bowed. “
Ohayo!
”

“
Ohayo gozaiamasu
! What today?”

“Cory.” I pointed at the glass display cabinet. “What do you want? I’ve never had the squid, but everything else is good.”

He picked the salmon, I took the
mochiko
chicken. I paid with two thousand-yen notes and took my change. Cory took the plastic bag and, after another round of mutual bowing, we went back to the alcove.

I jumped him to a beach and held onto his arm as he staggered. “Sit,” I said.

He dropped to his knees and I sat cross-legged, snagging the bag away from him. The sun was rising out of the ocean before us and the air was warm and slightly humid, overlaid with salt and tropical flowers.

“Okay. Where are we
now
?”

“Queensland.”

He looked at me blankly.

I added, “East coast of Australia.”

He swiveled his head around, looking for kangaroos, maybe. “Australia?”

“That’s right. You’re now standing on your head. Also, you’ve time traveled. It’s tomorrow, here. International dateline and all that.”

I put his bento box in front of him and started eating from mine. After a minute, he opened his and began eating, too.

“Doesn’t this mess you up?” he said around a mouthful of buckwheat noodles. “The sun coming up in early afternoon?”

I shrugged. “On the International Space Station, the sun comes up sixteen times a day. A little jumping around here on Earth doesn’t even come close.”

“Huh.”

“I’ve done stupid things, though, where I’ve followed the sun around the globe for thirty-six hours without sleeping. I started seeing things. Now I try to get to sleep by two
A.M.
every morning.”

“You mean two
A.M.
Pacific?”

I smiled. “Let’s just say two in the morning in
my
home time zone.”

He frowned. “Why are you so secretive?”

“I don’t like being drugged, chained, and imprisoned.”

“What? Has that happened?”

“It’s been tried. It has happened to … others.” I looked at him. “Uh, by the way, Cory, I know you agreed not to talk about this thing I do, but you should also know that if people find out that you’re working with me, they might try to
use
you to get to me.”

“What do you mean, ‘use?’”

“My dad has a saying: When you squeeze a lemon, it’s hard on the lemon. Interrogation. Hostage. That sort of ‘use.’ So, keeping quiet about me is good for both of us.”

He was quiet for a moment. “I see that, I guess. What happens when I want to show NASA a fully working suit that’s been tested in orbit?”

It was my turn to be quiet for a moment. Finally I said, “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

“We have to
get
to orbit, first.”

EIGHT

Davy: I’d say we’ve outstayed our welcome

Once she realized that Millie was serious about the “no expense spared” thing, Seeana kept adding items to the facilities list. Then new items would remind Millie of other things and she would add items, then bring the new list to Davy.

“Get these, please.”

Davy sighed and recruited Cent to help him shop.

“Oxygen? No problem. I’ve got just the place.”

Millie said, “We’ll need a small portable unit for when we transfer her. We’re three thousand feet higher than Wichita, too. She may need to go with a nose/mouth mask instead of a cannula.”

Cent said. “We’ll get a few four-double-M tanks and get them recharged, two at a time.”

“How big is a double-M?” Millie asked.

Cent held her hand flat next to her hip to how show tall they were. “Thirty-four hundred liters. About forty pounds. I’ll also get extra regulators, cannula, and plenty of tubing. Do you want to consider a concentrator?”

Davy said, “What’s that?”

Millie answered. “Plugs in. Produces oxygen from regular air. Well, produces ninety percent O
2
, up to about five liters per minute. We should probably consider it for the long run.”

Davy said, “But with tank backups, right? In case the unit fails, or we lose power?”

“Oh, yes.”

While Cent dealt with oxygen, Davy hit general medical-supply stores for other equipment and expendables, ranging from bedpans to a suction pump with reservoirs, and monitors for blood oxygenation, pulse, blood glucose, and respiration.

Millie went over the equipment with Seeana. They kept adding things to the list, but, two days before Millie’s mother was due to get her surgical staples removed, even Millie had to admit, “We’re ready, I guess.”

Davy said, “No. We need one more thing.”

*   *   *

“What is it?” Cent asked.

Davy had put it on the top shelf of the master-bedroom closet and mounted the siren on the wall. It looked halfway between a laptop and a piece of lab equipment.

“Broad spectrum radio-frequency detector. Four kilohertz to eight gigahertz. That’s why it has the three different antennas.” He was standing on a stool to reach the screw-down terminals on the siren. He left one wire hanging, unconnected.

“Turn off your phone.”

Cent fished her phone from her jeans pocket and powered it down. “You know we killed the cellular on this.”

“Yeah, but you still have Bluetooth, WiFi, and GPS, right?”

“GPS doesn’t transmit, does it?”

“Yeah, you’re right. I’m more worried about GPS
trackers
: devices that actively transmit their location. However, any signal detectable can be tracked so I don’t want anything going out from here.”

“You worried about Seeana?”

“Not especially. Or the health aids. But someone
else
could plant a tracker on any of them, you know?” Davy hit the power switch and watch it go through its boot-up process, then went through a few menu choices. The device began beeping.

“Huh. Something at two thousand four hundred twenty-two megahertz. Oh. Two point four gigahertz. Go see if your mom is on her computer.”